For films up for Oscar tonight, facts feed the fiction

For four top films, facts feed the fictionShould movies bend history to make a good story?

AMY BIANCOLLI, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, February 27, 2011

Of the 10 movies up for Best Picture at the Oscars tonight, four are based on fact: period biopic The King's Speech, Facebook expose The Social Network, boxing drama The Fighter and man-cuts-off-arm saga 127 Hours.

The latter two were made with active input from the people who inspired them. The former two were not. They used fact as the clay for fiction, something pinched and molded to suit the tidy formal elements of filmmaking. The results are first-rate, meticulously structured movies. But they are not documentaries. They do not adhere word-for-word to the historical record.

And there's the rub. Should it matter if The King's Speech takes license with King George VI? Should we care if The Social Network turns a Digital Age entrepreneur into a self-obsessed Shakespearean villain? Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has said he owed his "fidelity" to storytelling, not the truth — but what if the storytelling includes high drama, hard-core partying and sex with giggly women that the principals describe as way out of proportion?

"You don't go to a movie to get your history because a movie is not going to give you that," said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "It's not what they do. It's not what they're good at ... which is why I tend to roll my eyes whenever, the minute a movie comes out, someone starts screaming about how 'this wasn't how it was.' Well, of course it wasn't."

Driven by marketing

One of those complaining (if not screaming) is Wheeler Dixon, a film historian at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He outlined his objections to The King's Speech,Tom Hooper's inspiring and spiffy portrait of the stammering monarch: It ramps up conflict with the king's speech therapist and discounts the Nazi leanings of his brother, Edward VIII.

Too many films are driven by marketing and money concerns, he said. He referred to A Beautiful Mind, Ron Howard's Oscar-winning portrait of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, which fantasized some elements and glossed over others. "What they're trying to do," he said, "is make the film more palatable to the audience by using conventional narrative tropes."

And yet those tropes can serve a purpose. Houston-based author Mat Johnson sees storytelling - all storytelling, whether conscious or unconscious - as an effort to make sense of "these chaotic bits of information" that clutter the everyday. "We do this with our own lives," he said.

Striving for balance

Still, it's tricky. His own works include a graphic novel set during Hurricane Katrina (Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story) and, out this week, a satirical adventure that incorporates Edgar Alan Poe (Pym: A Novel). "It obviously is a balance that you're constantly trying to negotiate, because if you fall over the edge in the wrong direction, it gets really ugly, really quickly. People will hate you for it, not the least of whom are the people involved in the direct subject matter."

Paul Schneider, a Boston University professor and a veteran director of ripped-from-the-headlines TV movies, feels "a tremendous responsibility" to hew as closely as possible to the facts, ma'am. He once filmed a docudrama about the infamous Menendez brothers murder case, taking care to illustrate the killers' claims directly from their testimony. Filmmakers simply shouldn't meddle with important details, he said. But dreaming up conversations within the known facts - "that's where the wiggle room is. And that's where the art comes in."

Novelist Nicole Krauss, meanwhile, finds real-world subjects confining: "I begin to feel a little trapped if I'm responsible to a particular type of chronicling." In Krauss' latest novel, Great House, a writer named Nadia boldly fictionalizes the pain of others, confident in the artist's freedom "to create, to alter and amend."

Like Nadia, Krauss feels that "a writer shouldn't be held responsible to what we think of as reality or history," she said. "And I never feel as a novelist that I'm somehow beholden to an accurate representation of events."

Lasting image

For his part, the Bard made a habit of messing with history. (He also "had his eye on the box office," Dixon allowed.) Richard III is not necessarily a fair and balanced portrait of the 15th-century Plantagenet; thanks to Shakespeare, his name is forever associated with power-crazed homicidal mania.

Art persuades. For good or for ill, it shapes our understanding of the past. And film has a long demographic reach. "A good chunk of the knowledge we have about history probably comes from movies," said Thompson. If kids watching Pocahontas grow up with a distorted idea of Colonial life, "then, yeah, that's an irresponsible movie."

Schneider, too, worries about viewers' tendency to conflate the invented and the real. "People who watch (movies) such as The Social Network ... they take these things for fact," he said. "If you're basically fictionalizing after a certain point, then what you're doing is misleading people."